mongo_jones

damiano's for ny style pizza; india sweet house on pico/fairfax for north indian comfort food; sunnin (spelling?) for great lebanese on the corner of westwood and santa monica. does hanbat sullung tang (again, sp.?) in koreatown count? they only have one item on their menu (with variations).

something else to think about as we consider what "new indian" might mean in a more global sense is this (i've written about this on the indian forum as well and again i am probably echoing vikram here--he is smarter and has eaten more than me): one of the most exciting things that's happening in india as the economy liberalizes and middle-class people begin to start leaving their home regions for work in the major metros across the country is that the different indian culinary traditions are beginning to encounter each other in a fuller way than they have before. along with other social forces that i've written about elsewhere on egullet this is leading to the breaking the monopoly of the north-indian "moghlai" restaurant as the kind of place you go out to to eat indian food in india. (another symptom of this change is the explosion in regional cookbook publication in india--penguin has an excellent regional series and they make most of their money from cookbook sales--arundhati roy notwithstanding.) within india therefore a welcome form that "new indian" cuisine may take is the presence of foods from different parts of india on the same menu in a structured, articulated way that currently doesn't exist (not to my knowledge, at least--that is to say outside of special food festival menus at the 5-stars). this would be "fusion" in a very indian sense and indeed vibrant and "new". this again is something gourmets not familiar with the contours of indian regional cuisines may not be able to recognize. but i think they should make rhetorical space for these kinds of articulations alongside their own. ------ edit to add link to vikram's excellent article on swati snacks in bombay: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=40612

plus i'm in the smartass protection program there's more pictures to come, by the way. i just realized that i should start a new reply each time i add in a bunch since if i just edit them into the original post the thread doesn't rise back up to the top and people who've seen the early pics may not realize that i've been inserting new ones as well.

or at the leela palace in bangalore :-) yes, doubly ironic given how casual the rest of bangalore is. i have to say though in defense of those westerners hiding out at the "continental" restaurants at the 5-stars (and i might just be echoing vikram here) that if you're in india on a long trip, no matter how much you love indian food there probably comes a point when you want something familiar. my wife took a bottle of kim-chi with her on our trip this winter for just this reason. some years ago i almost went insane without indian food on an extended trip through eastern-europe. a couple of hours before boarding our return flight from amsterdam i broke down and dragged my companions to an indian restaurant--i might have been the first indian the owner had seen in a while because he sat down with us and told us his highly baroque life-story (which involved banking scandals in hong kong). the menu and food strangely, or not so strangely, were identical to what you get at the average north-indian restaurant in the u.s. but that was one lunch when i happily scarfed down helpings of butter chicken and creamy saag paneer.

monica, i know it is rude to consistently spurn such generosity but it strikes me that i can just order them directly from namaste.com. they charge $6.99 to ship things weighing up to 10lbs--that's more than 20 of the large packets at 99 cents each! $27 for biscuits that'll last ages. like a miser i only eat 2 per cup of tea! but i do thank you and nessa for pointing me to the "should have been obvious but wasn't" stratagem of looking online. mongo

this is what i suggested earlier. there is a huge restaurant culture in india (and growing as the middle-class gets more and more moneyed). however, it is coded differently at all levels. even many of the best restaurants in delhi--the magnificent bukhara, for example, are raucous places (it is a different story at its almost as good stable-mate dum-pukht, which in keeping with its awadhi nawabi theme has a more stately ambience). across the board however dress-codes are pretty much non-existent and only a few places are stuffy (usually the restaurants at the snobby oberoi).

dunno about happy hour but they have great food.

this is my first time uploading pictures, so this first one is a test--please let me know if i need to shrink it down some more. this is the dim-sum spread at our table at 888 seafood in rosemead dimsummers.seated from left to right: foodzealot, jschyun and man from northern california. standing: mongo jones aladin's breathtaking entrance on the most fashionable section of vermont bengali style chicken curry at aladin (note the protective layer of oil--really, it is good for the heart) bengali-muslim style goat-meat biryani at aladin aladin's great layered porotha (the bengali word for "paratha") and a portion of bata-machher jhal (bata is a tiny silvery fish, jhal=hot/spicy). you wouldn't eat the fish with the porotha--they just happen to be next to each other on the table. names of available bengali fish and the prices on their wall (the american flag made its appearance after sep 11, 2001--they're down the street from an islamic center that was attacked). as per the owner i should now be able to get most of these in denver. more to be edited in later

pics coming, i promise. i have relatives in town and am only getting on the net fitfully between outings. but speaking of chiachiangmyun, i forgot about the great korean-chinese dinner we ate at shin-peking on olympic and hobart (?). they do a mean chiachiangmyun. have you eaten there? and does anyone know what the relationship is between the korean chiachiangmyun and the shanghainese version?

father's office still around?

you people are too good only but i will wait and see if i can convince these people to source them for me. if i get no traction i will shamelessly take advantage of your generosity--though i don't know what i could send you in exchange from colorado: pictures of john elway maybe?

i don't do well with hairy fruit. also fruit with pulpy tumorous flesh. doubtless some childhood trauma that only recovered memory therapy can resolve. speaking of offensive fruits: i have relatives visiting from singapore and we were discussing kathal (green jackfruit) and durian. my uncle eats both and in his words "durian is 10 times more smelly than jackfruit--it has a genuinely offensive smell". it is apparently sold in singaporean grocery stores wrapped in layers of plastic and chilled to kill the odor in the store. and now i must take said relatives to see the rockies.

there are some similar ones in english stores and the such. but 1) they're expensive and i'm cheap and 2) they don't have that slightly burnt flavor that the brittania bourbons do. plus 3) if you must know the brittania factory was en route to my grandparents house in calcutta (off of taratola road) and eating them is not just a taste thing but also a whole sense memory thing for the aroma as we drove by the factory in a taxi.

somehow i have never eaten a mangosteen. is it native only to southern india? edit to add answer to my own question: "The tree was planted in Ceylon about 1800 and in India in 1881. There it succeeds in 4 limited areas–the Nilgiri Hills, the Tinnevelly district of southern Madras, the Kanya-kumani district at the southernmost tip of the Madras peninsula, and in Kerala State in southwestern India. " from http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/morton/mangosteen.html and from another site: "Garania mangostana Mangosteen Fruit Garcinia hanburyii Gamboge Garcinia morella Indian Gamboge " no mention of kokum, though kokum and cambodge are related http://www.backyardgardener.com/names/latin3.html

in related news: our local indian grocery has for some reason stopped carrying brittania's bourbon chocolate biscuits--my very favorite thing for dipping into my morning cup of tea.

perhaps if you're eating haggis?

i once drank a lot of something called "scotch whiskey" out of a bottle at a party (many years ago). i think it was a supermarket generic--"lucky's scotch whiskey". is there really something branded "beer"? who makes it?

"It's a daunting gantlet that diners must penetrate" from the review. is this a common american spelling of "gauntlet"? or is bruni being fey? or is he talking about train tracks?

why not just call it indian-american cuisine? especially since all these chefs (with the exception of madhur jaffrey) have made their mark in north-america and have had their cooking/approaches marked by it. or does "indian-american" sound too low-falutin'? edit to add: perhaps a better term for something like this (and for the best of what is usually called "fusion" as well) might be "cosmopolitan cuisine". what you describe above is essentially a french (?) dessert with indian ingredients. i note this not to carp about authenticity but to point out that to label it merely "new indian" would be to limit/elide its more complex geographical genealogy. it isn't just new "indian", it is also new something else. what distinguishes it from other "new" things happening in india is that not everyone working in india is necessarily looking at the west as the only point of reference--indian tastes/flavors/cooking are colliding with all kinds of other south-east asian cuisines as well. an american might not recognize this as "new indian" because you can't look at it and isolate its accents the way you might be able to with something that is clearly a take on a tart or a millefeuille. i hope this clarifies further why i think it is limited to only give the latter kind of thing the moniker "new indian"--especially in an article that throbs so palpably with the pleasure of discovery and which seeks to ascribe to this discovery the heft of historical significance.

this sounds somewhat like the bengali goja (not the method of preparation, but the thing itself)--can someone who's had both verify or correct?

not quite accurate. there's a HUUUUGE restaurant culture in india. it just isn't coded the way it is in the u.s or europe. and it isn't simply the case that the greatest cooking occurs in households, but more accurately that different genres of cooking occur in households and restaurants--with the kitchens of the rich falling closer to the expensive restaurant end of the spectrum. of course this is slowly changing (as in the genres beginning to mix).

well, this would be "new indian" in the american context. there's all kinds of "new" indian happening in india that people in the u.s don't know anything about (and "manchurian cauliflower" isn't it--if anything that's a traditional dish at this point; ditto for madhur jaffrey's shrimp dish as described). i'd warn against the temptation to only recognize novelty when it happens in the west. just because american gourmets are now encountering sometihng other than chicken tikka masala for the first time doesn't mean that innovation or "novelty" have only just reared their heads in the indian culinary context(s). of course the dominant culture (or even just a solipsistic one) usually only recognizes things on its own turf and on its own terms.

rushina, kimchi can be either store-bought or home-made. we go either way depending on availability of the brand we like and my wife's patience for doing it herself. it is arduous, smelly work to prep and make it and if commercial versions just a rung below home-made quality are available it doesn't always make sense to chop 20 heads of cabbage at home. then again we're lazy people. one of the best things to do with kimchi, by the way, at least in my opinion, is to make kimchi-chigae--a spicy soup with kimchi as the star, alongside meat or fish or something else. kimchi fried rice is also excellent, as are kimchi pancakes--my wife makes all of these with cabbage kimchi, i don't know if that is the norm or whether they can be made with radish etc. kimchi as well. i would give you these recipes if i could get my wife to write them down for me, but she has no interest in my egulleting activities, certainly not enough to make her sit down and think about and write down recipes she cooks entirely by feel. jschyun and skchai are going to have to be your sources here. but the next time we make kimchi at home i'll take notes for you--my wife and m-i-l just made a huge batch when we were in l.a so i doubt she'll want to tackle it again anytime soon. we're talking about coming to bombay on our next trip--some very close friends of mine live there now. don't know when it'll be but you can be sure we'll have kimchi and kochujang with us. we can plan an egullet dinner--while my wife is uninterested in talking about food online she is very easily talked into cooking for people. how's that book going? mongo

i hate the stuff. not a big fan of sesame seeds on my confections. love it in korean food though.

Mongo, are you saying that, unlike naan, which can run the gamut of quality, butter chicken is usually either great or crappy and seldom in between? I'm curious, do you make butter chicken at home? no, i don't make butter chicken at home--in fact i know of very few indians who do (probably most of those who do are in the diaspora), but that is just from my own experience. as for my comment about the continuum, my contentious claim is that there is less distance travelled from a great butter chicken to a crappy one than there is for many other famous indian dishes (like for example a dosa or a gulab jamun or a biryani). i'm trying to search for an american analog--if i come up with one i'll post again.